Gender and absentee slave-ownership in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores the relationship between gender, property and power in the context of British slave-ownership in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, working to unpick the categories of slave-owner, ‘West Indian’ and absentee. It demonstrates how both men and women played crucial roles as transmitters of West Indian property, acting as conduits who helped to facilitate the transmission of slave-based wealth into metropolitan society. The heart of the thesis is an analysis of qualitative material. It uses Barbadian slave-owner Thomas Lane as a lens through which to interrogate the complicated relationship between absentee slave-ownership and masculinity, exploring how male absentees, unlike many of their literary counterparts, were able to conceive and present themselves as both slave-owners and gentlemen. But it places a particular focus on female absentees, examining the mediations and constraints that these women faced, while also highlighting the ways in which they were able to carve a place for themselves within these always restricted parameters. Looking at Jamaican slave-holder Anna Eliza Grenville, it examines the ways she negotiated her position as a married woman and substantial property owner, as well as situating her slave-ownership within her broader social, political and imperial worlds. Indeed, nearly a quarter of absentees who claimed compensation following the abolition of slavery in 1834 were women. Using the records of the Slave Compensation Commission the thesis examines, where possible, how the most substantial female slave-owners became claimants and how they bequeathed the Caribbean property they owned or compensation they received. Absentee slave-owners were a large and diverse range of people. This thesis demonstrates just some of the many ways that these absentees, male and female, worked to bring slave-ownership ‘home’ to metropolitan Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".